Reading
What makes skilled adult readers good at comprehension?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
In adult readers of Portuguese, understanding spoken language, vocabulary and awareness of word parts predicted reading comprehension, while basic word-decoding accuracy mattered only indirectly.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Single-session battery of reading and language tasks in typical adult readers, analysed with hierarchical regression and path/mediation models of the Simple View of Reading.
- N
- N=67 · 67 typical adult readers (54 women), mostly college students; no separate experiments.
- Population
- European Portuguese-speaking adults aged 19-47 with no reading, neurological or psychiatric diagnosis, 86.6% college students
- Outcome
- Reading comprehension of a 495-word text (literal, inferential and vocabulary-in-context questions), predicted by word reading, oral language comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, morphological and phonological awareness, RAN and working memory
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Key findings
Word reading and oral language comprehension together explained about 27% of the variance in reading comprehension; oral comprehension looked stronger but the difference was not statistically reliable. Adding vocabulary and fluency explained roughly 7% more, but only vocabulary contributed on its own, and word reading's direct effect vanished, acting mainly through vocabulary. Among the remaining skills, only morphological awareness had a direct effect on comprehension, while phonological decoding and rapid naming did not even correlate with comprehension.
Methodology
The researchers gave 67 Portuguese-speaking adults, mostly university students, a battery of tasks: a 495-word text with comprehension questions, a matched listening-comprehension task, timed word and pseudoword reading, vocabulary, phonological awareness, rapid naming of digits and letters, backward digit span, and two spoken tasks tapping morphological awareness (spotting real suffixes). They then tested whether the two-part Simple View of Reading (word reading plus oral comprehension) explained comprehension, whether adding vocabulary and fluency helped, and whether other skills worked directly or only through word reading and fluency.
Limitations
The two central comprehension measures were newly adapted and had poor internal reliability (alphas of 0.49 for reading and 0.40 for listening), which weakens every estimate and may even explain why vocabulary appeared as a separate predictor. With 67 mostly female students the study could detect only moderate effects, and one fit index (RMSEA) indicated poor model fit that the authors set aside. Because all data are correlational and collected at one time, the path models describe statistical associations, not causal routes from skills to comprehension, and they may not apply to struggling readers or to opaque orthographies like English.
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